Retail Analytics Trends

Trends that will shape the retail market in the coming years

Using our technology to serve our clients have enabled our organization to combine the insights driven by analytics and interactive visualization on the foundation of integrated internal and industry market data.

Retailers and suppliers can now utilize data governance through modern business intelligence platforms, increasing transparency without compromising security—a reality that simply is not possible using shared Excel workbooks, text files, EDI transactions, or static reporting methods. This data sharing is leading to better coordination around key performance indicators (KPIs) like fulfillment times and inventory turns while increasing revenue for both parties.

In today’s retail market, consumers not only appreciate, but expect a personalized omni-channel experience. And retailers are leveraging technologies like augmented reality, machine learning, and natural language processing to gain a deeper understanding of consumers’ wants and needs.

As a result, retailers are tasked with transforming massive volumes of data into actionable insights. Key performance indicators will continue to shift and more than ever, organizations need to be prepared to adapt. Analytics will continue to drive strategy, execution, and innovation—for both the customer experience and internal operations. Download this paper for the hottest retail analytics trends that will impact retailers in the coming years.

Business intelligence norms are evolving across the retail industry, and leading retailers are prioritizing analytics initiatives as a result. While the trend toward retail analytics isn’t new, maturing technologies and techniques are.

As mobility and analytics collide with data, both the consumer and the retailer inch closer to a more accurate, real-time analytics experience. These are some of the facts that highlights newest trends in retail and consumer goods analytics, including:

Advanced analytics is no longer just for analysts

Mobile reporting is fully realized

The Internet of Things starts to improve data accuracy

Omnichannel data integration gets exciting

Robots bring big opportunities to retail data

Augmented and virtual reality offer more insights

As technology continues to shape the consumer retail experience, organizations are learning more and more about how these new devices and experiences affect customer behavior. Success will all come down to the data—how its collected, interpreted, and acted upon.

From budding startups to global enterprises, this growing commodity is triggering retail organizations to deploy business intelligence (BI) solutions that will elevate and accelerate data-driven decisions. Successful organizations are prioritizing a modern BI approach, and in turn, priming their workforce to be the most analytically savvy generation ever seen.

For a competitive edge in the coming years, organizations must recognize the strategies, technologies, and business roles that can enhance their approach to business intelligence. Here are five analytics trends that we’ll see in the retail and consumer-goods markets this year.

Strategic partnerships with suppliers are more important than ever. Retailers are turning to visual analytics to make sense of a growing web of complex orders and inventory levels, sharing these insights with suppliers and manufacturers.

These new shared analyses—based on granular, transaction-detail data—allow for strategy validation and better coordination of fulfillment times to meet a growing complexity of ordering scenarios including in- store, online, and order online with in-store pick up. This is leading to higher on-shelf availability rates and fresher product offerings, which means higher customer satisfaction.

Cloud-based analytics and scalable subscription models are making this collaboration even easier while reducing expenses and implementation time. Japanese home center retailer, GooDay, worked with their top 50 vendors to create inventory dashboards, shared in the cloud through a SaaS business intelligence platform. This allowed the retailer to shift towards a just-in-time inventory model, reducing inventory levels by 50% while increasing sales and in-stock position, freeing up working capital.

In a typical day, knowledge workers jump between enterprise applications for ERP, CRM, supply chain, marketing, human resources, and a separate application for analytics. Instead, the flow should be a seamless, gaining insight from an analysis, and then taking action within the application.

As web-based application become standard, weare seeing a merging of enterprise and analytics applications. Companies are embedding visual analysis within applications and the reverse, applications embedded within the visual analysis.

For example, retailers are embedding visual analytics into product ordering applications, helping teams validate that orders are complete or that they make sense based on past sales history and existing ordering quantities. Fashion retailers are using embedded analytics to validate orders for certain styles, size, and color to avoid incurring additional manufacturing costs for small production run sizes.

With the self-service boom, non-analysts throughout retail organizations are becoming increasingly data- savvy. Store managers and bookkeepers alike are digging deeper into data thanks to interactive visualizations that allow them to ask and answer their own questions at the speed of thought.

Most big-box vendors are also leveraging advanced predictive analysis to allocate labor during peak times and provide quality customer care.

Advanced analytics functions such as clustering and outlier detection help store employees make data-driven decisions. The resulting insights empower them to choose the most efficient store layout, enhance the shopping experience, and ultimately increase the bottom line.

Macy’s, Inc. is one of the world’s premier retailers with 885 stores in 45 states and a major e-commerce presence. “We have oceans of data, and a lot questions coming from many different angles. There’s a thirst for knowledge,” says Nihar Bhatt, Macy’s marketingsystems manager.

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